When Carrick was on the road, she read a book called Lying by Lauren Slater. Intrigued by the words on the cover of the Penguin paperback she brought home, I read it, too. In place of a subtitle, the words are: "There is only one kind of memoir I can see to write and that's a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark."

The actual subtitle of Lying, we learn on the inside title page, is "A Metaphorical Memoir."

The first chapter of the book, in its entirely, is "I exaggerate."

Slater tells us that she suffers from epilepsy, although epilepsy may be a metaphor. Towards the end of the book, she draws a parallel between addiction and the epileptic seizures — which bring ecstasy and energy as well as terror — that have shaped her life from girlhood through her college years. (Or haven't, I suppose.)

It just so happens that Slater has unwittingly stumbled into an AA meeting. She continues to go to it for some time, even through she doesn't have a chemical dependency. One day when she's feeling depressed, her sponsor (she's gone through all the motions of joining the group) gives her the lowdown on the concept of "acting as if."

"Act as if you are feeling good, and productive, and eventually, it will become that way. In the program we call it 'Acting as If...'"

Slater mulls this concept a bit, finding it partly right, partly wrong. Then she writes:

"Act as if. As if."

"In this way, fictions become facts."

Slater also ruminates about the fifth step, which she says a lot of AAers consider the most critical.

"That was the step where you got absolutely honest, where you told another person about all the wrongs and deceits and manipulations.... AAers like to say, 'You are only as sick as your secrets,' and how well I understood that."

Slater really couldn't do a fifth step in the program, she says, because part of it would have to be the admission that she was not an alcoholic. But she allows that the memoir we're reading is, in a way, a fifth step of its own.

In the Afterword, Slater writes:

Slater succeeded in lying truthfully. I wasn't always sure where she was coming from, but I always knew how we got to where we'd arrived.

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Slater also wrote Welcome to My Country, Prozac Diary, and Opening Skinner's Box, a quirky look at some of the most controversial psychological experiments of the Twentieth Century. It was assailed by academics and some of the people she interviewed for twisting reality and making up quotes. Slater admitted to "ten minor" factual errors, according to the New York Times, said there was no "willful deceit," and promised to correct them in subsequent editions.

I'll pass. I think I got the message the first time around.